James Dean

by Darwin Porter

  As the script for Rebel had originally been conceived, the film would have opened with sixteen-year-old Judy being arrested for solicitation. That episode was later “tamed,” rewritten to depict being disciplined at the police station for breaking curfew.

  Jayne Mansfield as a cover girl in March, 1965, and...

  Actually, Ray was secretly dating Mansfield at the time, and over pillow talk, she was urging him to cast her as Judy. She agreed to a screen test, but the director later confessed, “I didn’t put any film in the camera. I knew at the time I was never going to use her.”

  Ray was also engaged at the time in “carnal adventures” with Shelley Winters, who recalled that his bungalow at the studio was “surrounded by night-blooming jasmine.” Also seen coming and going from that bungalow were two other blondes, Marilyn Monroe and Judy Holliday.

  Jayne Mansfield as Queen Deianira in Amori di Erole (The Loves of Hercules), released in 1960. Four months pregnant at the time of this photo, she insisted that Hercules be played by her husband, muscleman Mickey Hargitay.

  Outside Italy, where it was filmed, it was released as Hercules vs. the Hydra as a late-night TV teleplay.

  When Jimmy learned that Ray was dropping Jayne, both as a girlfriend and as a candidate for the role of Judy, he said, “Wait one night before telling her. Give me her number. I want to call her and tell her that I’d like to test the chemistry between Jim Stark and Judy.”

  “Okay, buster,” Ray responded. “But you’ll owe me one. You’ll get Jayne’s ass, and I’ll get yours.”

  Dubbed “The Working Man’s Marilyn Monroe,” Jayne seemed only too eager to welcome Jimmy into her home. She’d cleared the house of family members and servants so that she could entertain him in private.

  He later reported to Ray, “As you know from banging Jayne, she’s more of a cinematic sight gag than an actress, but she sure is bosomy and breathy. She cooed and aaahed her way through the night, especially when I plugged her. She greeted me at the door in an ivory-colored see-through négligée. She didn’t walk toward me, she sashayed.”

  “I couldn’t wait to sink my teeth into those pink nipples of hers. She served me dinner. All her décor is pink and heart-shaped. Cupids everywhere. She even dyes the mashed potatoes pink. Naturally, the drink was pink champagne.”

  “I detest the color pink,” she told him. “But it’s important for my image. Men want women pink, helpless, and to do a lot of deep breathing. When I was first told about how sex worked, I laughed and then I cried. I just couldn’t see the point of it. Fortunately, I’ve changed.”

  “After our romp in her pink bed with its pink sheets, she told me that she just knew that she could play ‘that trollop Judy,’ even though I’m a good girl.”

  “If you get the part, we’ll have to change the title,” he said. “Make it Rebel With a Cause.”

  “And what might that be?” she asked.

  “To bang Suzi every night.” [She had already told him that she’d nicknamed her vagina Suzi.]

  After that encounter, Jimmy never saw Mansfield again and, needless to say, she didn’t get the role of Judy.

  “I’m Going to Marry James Dean”

  —Natalie Wood

  Ray might have gone for Carroll Baker had not a sixteen-year-old brunette, a ferociously competitive former child actress, entered the fray.

  Her name was Natalie Wood.

  She had worked with Jimmy before in the teleplay, I’m a Fool, based on a plot by Sherwood Anderson, and more fully described in Chapter Eight of this biography. I’m a Fool was eventually broadcast in November of 1954 through television’s General Electric Theater, hosted by Ronald Reagan.

  Natalie Wood is seen emoting with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. When she read the script, she said, “I am Judy. The story mirrors themes from my own rebellious teen years.”

  After her first viewing of East of Eden, Natalie exited from Hollywood’s Egyptian Theater exclaiming to her girlfriend, “I’m going to marry that Jimmy Dean!”

  “I felt an instant link to Judy,” Natalie said. “I just had to take the role to express something inside of me. Up until Rebel, I had been a child actress, or else playing an ingénue. Judy was real, a gutsy character. The prospect of bringing her to the screen with Jimmy thrilled me.”

  As she admitted, she stalked Ray, trying to get the role. “Nick still saw me as a child actress in pigtails,” she lamented. “I knew I had to convince him I was grown up. Actually, I was only sixteen, but I had the desires of a woman.”

  “Then one night, I was involved in a car accident with Dennis Hopper, who would also get cast in Rebel. Ever since Nick Adams, who was also cast in the picture, took my virginity, I’d been carrying on with both of them. Dennis and I had this car accident, and I was rushed to the hospital, injured.”

  “I ordered the nurse to call Ray at once and get his ass over here,” she said. “I wanted him to see me in my condition. He looked me over. I was a wild juvenile delinquent out speeding in a car with my lover. ‘Now do I get the part?’ I demanded of him. He thought about it a minute, and then said, ‘You are our Judy.’”

  “Ray not only gave me the part,” she told Jimmy. “He’s also fucking me. Is there a man who doesn’t desire a sixteen-year-old girl?”

  She revealed, “Nick took me to a tiny candlelit restaurant where the tablecloths were pink. We drank pink champagne. Jayne Mansfield had nothing on him when it comes to pink. Incidentally, pink is my favorite color.”

  “He then took me back to his suite at the Château Marmont, where he seduced me. He told me, ‘I want to make love to you.’ That was so romantic. Most of you young guys tell a gal, ‘I want to screw you. How about it?’”

  “Nick might be an old man, but some guys are still sexy after forty,” she said. “And he sure knows how to deliver the goods. “He’s a thirty-minute man in the saddle. Poor Dennis seems to shoot off just as he’s putting it in.”

  Later, she would tell her friends that she and Jimmy shared some of the same men: Arthur Loew, Jr., Nick Adams, Dennis Hopper, Steve McQueen, and Lance Reventlow. She included Tab Hunter in that list as well, although in his case, despite rumors, it’s unclear whether he was actually involved with Jimmy.

  Jack Simmons

  “THE HAWK” GLIDES INTO JIMMY’S LIFE

  Jack Simmons had come to Hollywood to become a movie star, or at least a screen actor. John Gilmore remembered his hook nose. “Everybody called him ‘The Hawk.’ He had a reputation as one of the most notorious faggots of Hollywood.”

  The first time Gilmore met Simmons, he was dancing with Rock Hudson at a gay bar in Santa Monica, the Tropical Village, and wearing a tight-fitting pink bikini. Gilmore wrote that Simmons was “a reject, a pitiful fringe-nut in Hollywood’s substratum, who captured Jimmy’s interest with his unwavering, doglike devotion.” Jack would later claim that Jimmy was the only love of his life.”

  Author Donald Spoto wrote: “For years, the Dean-Simmons friendship was the subject of considerable pornographic imagination. Both men died without uttering a word about the specifics of their relationship, and, as the old maxim runs, no one held the lamp. Most people in the social circle saw the devotion as one-sided. It was a case of the adoring Jack, the acolyte to a diffident Jimmy, who made him a kind of hip valet.”

  Jack Simmons (left), told friends that he was going to pursue James Dean, get him, and then spend the rest of his life doing whatever he wanted him to do.

  Based on events that later unfolded, only the first two parts of Jack’s plan ever came to be.

  Faye Nuell Mayo, Natalie’s stand-in on Rebel, claimed, “Simmons adored Jimmy, but how seriously Jimmy took him was really unclear to everybody.”

  Simmons was the best friend of Maila Nurmi (Vampira), and it had been through her that he had met Jimmy.

  Biographer Paul Alexander wrote: “When Jimmy returned to Hollywood, he and Jack Simmons became romantically involved. More than likely, it was Jack who made himself
available to Jimmy, for he had seen pictures of Jimmy in the newspapers and had gone to see East of Eden.”

  Jack told friends that he was going to pursue Jimmy, get him, then spend the rest of his life doing whatever Jimmy wanted him to do. Based on events that later unfolded, only the first two parts of Jack’s plan came true.

  Jimmy told William Bast that when they first met, he considered Simmons “a pest. He wants to have sex with me, but I keep turning him down. I’m not remotely attracted to the kid sexually. He keeps telling everybody that sooner or later, he’s going to kiss me.”

  Simmons did not take Jimmy’s rejection as his final word. He remained undaunted in his pursuit.

  Vampira learned and later talked about the intimate details of their relationship: “When Jimmy found out that Jack imposed no limits on what he would do sexually, Jimmy reappraised him. They had a lot of sex. Jack told me about it. But it wasn’t the usual kind of sex.”

  “With Jack, Jimmy began to live out his darker fantasies. He was very abusive to Jack and put him through all sorts of hideous, disgusting scenes, things no human should do to another. And Jack took it.”

  “I don’t want to go into the graphics, but surely, you can use your imagination. Bondage was the more vanilla stuff Jack went through.”

  Jimmy used his influence to get Simmons cast in a teleplay, The Dark, Dark Hour, which also starred Ronald Reagan.

  Jimmy got Ray to agree to a screen test that would include Simmons and himself as a means of evaluating his suitability as Plato. It was a disaster.

  The venue was the stage set for A Streetcar Named Desire, which had not yet been dismantled. The stairway to the Kowalski apartment in New Orleans was still there. Jimmy couldn’t resist running up those steps, bellowing like Brando did in both the stage and movie versions, “STELLA-A-A-A-A-A!”

  “I couldn’t believe what happened next,” Ray said. “Suddenly, Simmons followed Jimmy up the steps, and the two men disappeared behind a screen. We heard them giggling, followed by two golden streams of urine raining down from one of the flat’s windows. It turned out these jokers were having a pissing contest to see which stream could reach the greatest height. Jimmy said he won the contest, but how would I know?”

  He later told Ray, “Jack was nervous, and I figured pissing might relax him before the test.”

  “The boy just couldn’t act,” Ray said. “But he was a real pisser.”

  Ray rejected Simmons for the role of Plato. According to Stewart Stern, “In my script, I wanted to present Jim Stark and Plato in gay overtones. But Simmons was a bit much. It would have made Plato’s relationship with Jim Stark too obvious, just too much.”

  After Simmons was rejected as Plato, Jimmy managed to get him cast as Moose, one of the gang members.

  During the filming of Rebel, Simmons lived with Jimmy at his apartment on Sunset Plaza Drive.

  Simmons was absolutely devoted to and committed to Jimmy, but he finally dropped him altogether.

  Columnist Sidney Skolsky wrote: “Wherever Jimmy goes, Simmons was sure to follow. If Jimmy wants coffee, he gets it. A sandwich, Simmons gets it. He also runs interference for Jimmy, keeping people away if Jimmy doesn’t want to see them.”

  Decades later, Simmons would break down and sob at the mention of Jimmy’s name. He claimed that he had not only lost his “one true love,” but his soul as well.

  Sal Mineo

  MAKES PORNOGRAPHIC LOVE TO JIMMY IN FULL VIEW OF NICK RAY AS A DEMONSTRATION OF THEIR ONSCREEN CHEMISTRY

  For weeks, Sal Mineo, in avid pursuit of the role of Plato, had pursued Ray.

  Mineo was the veteran of two Broadway shows, including The King and I (during the course of which Yul Brynner had molested him backstage) and Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo. Despite his status as a fifteen-year-old, he was nonetheless fully immersed in homosexuality. “I matured early in the Bronx, especially one part of me.”

  Three views of Sal Mineo, America’s first (onscreen) gay teenager.

  At the time, he was already a film industry veteran, having appeared in two movies, Six Bridges to Cross, and The Private War of Major Benson, both released in 1955.

  Ray kept rejecting him as Plato, claiming, “I don’t see any possible chemistry between you and Dean.”

  But finally, he relented, inviting both Jimmy and Mineo to his lodgings at the Château Marmont.

  Mineo arrived wearing pegged pants, a skinny tie, and a jacket. Jimmy showed up in jeans and a Tshirt. “They were from different planets,” Ray said.

  Mineo later revealed what happened that late Sunday afternoon.

  “At first, Jimmy and I were awkward, and I gave a bad first reading of the script. Perhaps Ray was right: We had no sexual chemistry. But I was determined to play Plato, and begged for a chance to do it over. Ray tried to get us to relax with each other. Instead of reading the script, we were told to improvise.”

  “Suddenly, Jimmy and I were talking to each other, and he was fascinated to learn I’d been a street kid from the Bronx. We relaxed—and how! He even started to wrestle me, which ended up in a long, passionate kiss. We stripped down to our underwear and continued to wrestle some more until both of us got erections. Off came our panties.”

  “Right in front of Ray, I came on to Jimmy like gangbusters. Ray was all eyes. Jimmy and I really went at it. When I looked over at our director, he’d whipped it out and was jerking off. I got the role of Plato, and I later got Ray. But by then, I was already in love with Jimmy.”

  Something happened during the making of Rebel, Mineo said. “It was as close as you could get to a spiritual experience. Jimmy was the focus of all of it. Everything that happened was a result of his presence.”

  During the first week of his involvement with Rebel, Jimmy told Mineo that he couldn’t sleep and that he was overcome with a nervous anxiety. He went to three sessions with a psychiatrist. “This headshrinker told me to love my father. What a stupid assignment! I could have told him that fifteen years ago. The fucker should have tried to love my father himself.”

  “Whatever’s inside me makes me what I am. Cut me open and take it out, and let in the light, and it might kill my acting talent. Tennessee Williams calls it ‘creative malady.’ Sometimes, it’s the wackos who create the greatest art. Make them normal, and they may lose that neurosis that drives them to create in the first place.”

  Natalie’s double on Rebel, Faye Nuell Mayo, also became aware of Jimmy’s anxiety, and she thought she knew what might help to relieve his tension. She invited him to attend a class where Kenpō karate was taught.

  He attended only one class and didn’t like it. He told her, “Instead of a karate chop, I prefer to stick to my own kind of fighting. A finger with a sharp nail in the eyeball, and a castrating kick in the balls.”

  Casting Issues:

  A HENPECKED HUSBAND, A DOMINEERING TARANTULA OF A MOTHER, A CARDBOARD 1950 SITCOM MOM, & AN INCESTUOUS FATHER

  After players for Rebel’s three leading characters had been cast, Ray set about hiring actors for the secondary roles, including Jim Backus and Marsha Hunt.

  [Marsha Hunt, hailing from Chicago, was known as “Hollywood’s most unfortunate also-rans.” Attractive, and with alluring eyes, she spend most of her career under contract for MGM, making B-list pictures, or as a supporting player in such movies as Pride and Prejudice (1940) playing one of Greer Garson’s sisters.

  Regrettably, during the early 1950s, she came under fire from Senator Joseph McCarthy, who claimed she was a communist. When Ray cast her in 1955, she had not worked in three years because of her inclusion on the Red Channels list.

  When she arrived on the set of Rebel, she announced to Jimmy, “Here’s what’s left of Marsha Hunt after all those witch hunters in Washington finished with me.”

  A McCarthy-Era Tragedy: One of the candidates favored by Ray for the role of Jimmy’s mother was Marsha Hunt, whose involvement on Broadway in The Devil’s Disciple earned her a place on the cover of the March 6, 1
950 of LIFE magazine.

  Despite her competency in more than 50 film roles in the late 30s and 40s, her blacklisting by the film industry for her political views cost her the role of James Dean’s mother in Rebel Without a Cause, and virtually every other film role for which she applied throughout the rest of her working years.

  Ray, also a champion of left-wing positions, wanted her for the role of Jim Stark’s henpecking mother until a phone call came in from Jack Warner, asking him to get rid of her and to cast Ann Doran instead.]

  ***

  Doran, once marketed as “The Yellow Rose of Amarillo, Texas,” was cast as Jimmy’s domineering mother. As a hard-core shrew and a major league emotional blackmailer, her character reminds Jim Stark that, “I almost died giving birth to you.”

  [In time, Doran, a genuine Hollywood workhorse, would appear in some five-hundred motion pictures.]

  In an unlikely friendship, Jimmy bonded with her, although she claimed that he almost killed her after they’d first met. He had invited her for a ride on his motorcycle.

  At the police station, Mrs. Stark, as portrayed by Ann Doran, grips her son in a suffocating embrace.

  Jim Backus, cast as Jim Stark’s father, warned her, “Jimmy Dean is opinionated, and he’ll tell you how to act.”

  “Just let him try it!” she responded.

  Backus was right. After his first rehearsal with Doran, Jimmy attempted to tell her how to play it.